


A bone beneath the reaper’s veil

by Elyant



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Body Horror, Cemetery, Gen, I swear, Implied/Referenced Torture, It's not as sad or angsty as the tags imply, Very brief very vague allusion to Andrew's past abuse, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:40:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27301315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elyant/pseuds/Elyant
Summary: Someone was sitting cross-legged in front of a tomb. In this part of the graveyard where no one tended to the graves, the grass was tousled with weeds and wildflowers, and there were more crumbling stones than standing ones. As Andrew came closer he could see the engraving on the stone read “Jane Doe”, no dates associated.“The cemetery's closing.”Shockingly blue eyes turned to him, wide with surprise. “Oh. I hadn't realised how long I'd been here already.”
Relationships: Neil Josten & Andrew Minyard
Comments: 5
Kudos: 72





	A bone beneath the reaper’s veil

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been carrying this idea in my mind for several years now. I always open the draft in October, hoping and failing to finish writing it for Halloween. But this is it! I finally managed to write it in a way that satisfies me.
> 
> Even though some details are real things that happened in cemeteries I know (no meeting with cute ghosts though), I have no idea how actual cemeteries are managed nor if hiring part-time caretakers is a thing. But, hey, that's why suspension of disbelief is for!
> 
> Usual disclaimer: English is not my first language and the characters belong to their rightful owner, who is not me.

At 5.30pm Andrew started his daily round of the cemetery, directing the last few stragglers toward the gate with the help of a shrill whistle, as he's been doing for the last three months.

  


He had found the job advertisement by complete chance in the neighborhood paper that was delivered every month in their mailbox and usually went ignored. It would have suffered the same fate that morning if the breeze coming through the kitchen window hadn't opened the discarded paper on that precise page in front of Andrew.

“Morbid,” Nicky had commented, reading over his shoulder.

“No more than Aaron spending two afternoons a week at the morgue.”

“Yeah, but he wants to be a doctor.”

Andrew had raised an eyebrow, demanding how it was different. When Nicky had failed to find a convincing rejoinder, Andrew had grabbed the paper off the table and had gone to his room in search of his phone. 

That was how he had found himself employed as a temporary cemetery caretaker while the city hall searched for a more suitable replacement after the last one had retired. It was an easy job, it left him time for class and writing his thesis, and it was better paid than pouring drinks all night to underdressed students at Eden's Twilight. Besides the dead made for better company than the living in Andrew’s opinion. The minimal interactions required by the job mostly consisted in helping old ladies carry too full watering cans and bunches of colorful chrysanthemums to their loved ones' graves. They were happy to talk at him without expecting any answers.

  


On his way back toward the lodge at the cemetery entrance, a flash of red in his peripheral vision stopped him in his tracks. Several rows over on his left, in the unknown graves quarter, someone was sitting cross-legged in front of a tomb. In this part of the graveyard where no one tended to the graves, the grass was tousled with weeds and wildflowers, and there were more crumbling stones than standing ones. As Andrew came closer he could see the engraving on the stone read “Jane Doe”, no dates associated.

“The cemetery's closing.”

Shockingly blue eyes turned to him, wide with surprise. “Oh. I hadn't realised how long I'd been here already.”

Andrew frowned. He was sure there hadn't been anyone in front of this grave when he passed there earlier in his round. The young man rose to his feet and absently wiped his hands on his pants. He wasn’t much taller than Andrew, but had the lean figure of a runner. The mop of auburn hair that had caught Andrew’s eyes partially obscured his face when it wasn’t tilted upward, casting shadows over his eyes and sharp cheekbones. 

“Are you the – how is it called, the groundskeeper? Wasn't there an old man before?” the man asked as he followed Andrew to the gate.

“Caretaker. He retired.”

“Well, it was nice to meet you.” People were rarely genuinely pleased to meet Andrew, but the soft smile on the redhead's face somehow turned the greeting into more than simple politeness. “Have a good evening, Andrew!”

Distracted by the unusual encounter with the handsome stranger, Andrew was halfway inside the lodge when he realised the man had called him by his name even though Andrew hadn't told him. He whirled around, but the other man had already disappeared through the wrought-iron gate.

  


* * *

  


Andrew found him again a few days later at closing time in front of the same headstone. He hadn't seen the redhead coming through the gate. Even though he wasn't exactly paying close attention to all the coming and going of the cemetery's visitors, he would have remembered him passing in front of his lodge. He was either particularly stealthy or he’d been there long before the start of Andrew’s shift.

He was intrigued despite himself by this mysteriously attractive man.

“What's your name?”

“Neil.” The slight hesitation in the answer should have made it sound like a lie, but somehow it still felt like the truth. “What’s yours?”

Andrew frowned. “You already know my name.”

“Do I?” Neil's expression was genuinely confused. “Oh, well. I’ve had some trouble remembering things lately. I'm sorry I forgot. Will you tell me again?”

Neil’s smile was such a small hopeful thing that Andrew skipped over telling him he'd never told Neil his name in the first place and simply answered. The light of recognition in Neil’s eyes shouldn’t have been able to make Andrew’s heart flutter as it did.

Andrew watched Neil thread his way through the tombs. He disappeared behind a tree and didn’t reappear on the other side. Andrew knew there was no path behind the tree that Neil could have taken, shielding him from view from Andrew’s position. He knew because the entire layout of the cemetery was engraved in his memory like everything he spent more than twenty seconds studying.

  


* * *

  


Neil was still sitting in front of the same grave two days later, fiddling with a withered rose, staring at the plain tombstone. 

“Did you know her?” Andrew nodded toward the grave.

“My mother, I think.”

His face flickered in the low light of the setting sun, and for a moment it was a vision of horror. The left side was covered in severe burn marks, while the other side was caved in, the cheekbone crushed into his nose, distorting the shape of his face. His right eye was missing, the socket a dark hole from which knife slashes ran down like bloody tears tracks.

Andrew blinked and Neil was back, skin smooth, eyes as blue as ever, an apologetic smile on his lips. “If you’re here I guess it’s time for me to go, right?”

Still unsettled by the vivid hallucination - because it couldn’t have been real, merely a trick of the light surely - Andrew only nodded. As they turned toward the gate, he noticed that the rose had been reduced to a small pile of ashes on the earth in front of the anonymous grave. None of it had stained Neil’s fingers.

  


* * *

  


Nicky peered curiously at the books piled on the kitchen table. _The Book of Ghosts_ , _The Soul Rescue Manual_ , _Ghost hunting for dummies_. Andrew had been surprised at the extent of the supernatural and occult section of the university library. 

“Did the creepiness of your job finally get through to you, or did you change your major from criminal justice to occult sciences without telling us?”

“Neither.”

When Nicky realised nothing else was forthcoming, he turned back toward the stove muttering about what cryptic assholes his cousins were. Andrew wondered for half a second what Aaron had done to be grouped with him under that label before dismissing the thought as probably related to that cheerleader of his.

  


Andrew wasn’t afraid of ghosts. He’d seen and felt first hand the horror humans could inflict on each other. People were monstrous enough by themselves not to need the existence of supernatural beings. The only ghosts Andrew believed in had nothing to do with the specters of horror stories. They were the shadows of old families and opportunities that had let him slip by, memories of unwanted hands on his body, the vestiges of a past he was slowly learning to leave behind him.

The awareness that ghosts of the supernatural kind might be real didn’t fundamentally change Andrew’s perception of the world. He didn’t think he had ever seen any ghost before meeting Neil however. Had the job at the cemetery changed that, and would he have to deal with the spirits of people unable or unwilling to move on? Or was this new ability somehow reserved to seeing Neil?

  


* * *

  


Renee, the other part-time keeper, had found out about the job offer while her girlfriend was visiting her ex-boyfriend’s grave. Andrew had disliked her on principle at first. He hadn’t trusted her sensible clothing, the small silver cross around her neck, and her serene smile. He did his best to avoid interacting with her until a sudden downpour had prevented her from leaving the lodge at the end of her morning shift. It turned out that the peaceful facade was a veneer painted over darkness and steel that she was slowly trying to turn into concrete. They had more in common than met the eyes and she soon became one of his favourite people to spend time with.

“Andrew,” she greeted him with a kind smile. “It's good to see you, we haven’t crossed each other's path in quite some time.”

He noded in acknowledgement and asked her the question that made him arrive fifteen minutes early for his shift at the cemetery. “Have you ever met Neil? Short guy, auburn hair, blue eyes. Often around the unknown graves quarter.”

She tilted her head to the side as she thought it over. “No, I don’t think I ever did. Why?”

“No reason.” 

Renee narrowed her eyes in curiosity at the obvious deflection but let the matter go in favor of discussing her latest idea for their never-ending conversation about survival theories during a zombie apocalypse.

  


* * *

  


“You're dead.” Andrew saw no use in sugarcoating the truth for the living, applying the same logic when talking to a ghost only made sense, if not more so. What could the spirit of a dead man do to him anyway? 

(Plenty, if movies were to be believed.)

If he had had any expectations about Neil's reaction to his blunt affirmation, he would have been disappointed. The other man looked at him as if Andrew had just revealed that water was wet. 

“Oh, I know,” Neil replied with a shrug. “Being tortured to death by your own father is quite memorable. That's the one thing I can't forget actually.” It wasn't so much the words that made Andrew blink, but the way he said them like he was more annoyed about the amnesia than his own torture and murder.

"Is that why you're here? Vengeful spirit with unfinished business and all that."

The blank expression on Neil's face faded into confusion at the question. "I-I don't know. Maybe?" He paused, a little crease appearing on his forehead. "But he's dead too. Who I am supposed to be vengeful against then?" 

Andrew had no answer to that.

  


* * *

  


It’s been a month since Andrew first saw Neil in front of a grave that might or might not be his mother’s. They rarely talked more than ten or fifteen minutes at once, the time for Andrew to complete the closing round of the cemetery. The stilted interactions from the beginning had slowly morphed into actual conversations where they traded truths about themselves when Neil’s memory allowed him to. When it didn’t, Andrew told him about his thesis, the latest book he had read, or Nicky’s latest baking experiments. If Andrew now started by the unknown grave quarter instead of finishing with it, it was nobody business but his own.

  


"Can I touch you?"

Neil paused in a way that made Andrew think he was considering the question thoughtfully, not just the request of consent but also the concrete possibility of the action.

"I don't know." He held his hand out, palm up, long graceful fingers extended toward Andrew. Andrew’s own broader hand hovered above it for a second before closing the distance and passing through it. The space occupied by Neil's hand was not cold like ghost stories made it out to be. No shiver raked down Andrew's spine. There was just nothing.

_Huh_. Andrew had not forgotten that Neil wasn’t actually alive. He just had never seemed incorporeal. On the contrary he had always looked solid, real, even in the rare moments where his corpse-like appearance flickered through the smooth skin of his face. 

Andrew couldn’t help the sliver of disappointment that spread through his chest at the impossibility of the contact. A soft smile tugged at the corner of Neil’s lips, twisting his features into something akin to sadness. Andrew wanted to push his face away from him. He wanted to tell him to stop looking at him like that. 

In another life, Andrew realized, he might have wanted to kiss this boy with fiery hair and icy eyes.

  


* * *

  


A late night documentary about unsolved crimes brought about an unexpected explanation about Neil’s existence. 

To all appearances, Nathan Wesninski led a perfectly successfull life. Baltimore’s wealthiest businessman had a beautiful house, an elegant British wife, and an adorable little boy that looked just like him. However, away from the public eyes and behind the closed doors of his mansion, the reality was far more gruesome. Abusive husband and father, enforcer for the mob, Nathan had a body count higher than some of the more famous serial killers. Nicknamed the _Butcher of Baltimore_ by the press because of the cleaver he used to dismember his victims, the lack of evidence had never allowed the FBI to convict him of murder even though he was imprisoned a few years for embezzlement. His wife and son disappeared around that time for a decade until a shootout attracted the attention of the FBI back on the Butcher’s home almost a year ago. In the basement of the house were discovered the bullets-ridden corpses of Nathan Wesninski and his inner circle, but also the mangled body of Nathaniel, Wesninski’s missing son.

The only photograph of Nathaniel presented in the movie showed him at the age of eight years old, but combined with the more abundant images of Nathan, Andrew was able to recreate in his mind a picture of what he would have looked like at the time of his death. 

Something cold slithered down Andrew’s spine at the realization. 

  


* * *

  


“Nathaniel Wesninski.”

Neil shuddered at the name. The upper right side of his face flickered for a moment between cold blue and dark void, between the illusion of aliveness and the reality of death. 

“I don’t like that name very much,” he said, in a voice that didn't rise above a whisper, before vanishing.

He was standing in front of Andrew one second and the next Andrew was left standing alone next to what might be Mary Hatford-Wesninski’s grave. 

  


* * *

  


Neil didn’t come back.

It took several days for Andrew to notice. Neil’s appearances had never followed any schedule that Andrew could see, he’d be sitting in front of the same headstone every other day and then missing for three before reappearing two days in a row. Neil had managed to slot himself into Andrew’s routine easily and his sudden departure left him uncomfortably off-balance. 

  


Three weeks after Neil’s disappearance, Andrew arrived at the cemetery to discover the entrance surrounded by police cars. The cops, assisted by a team of gravediggers, were pulling Neil’s Jane Doe’s coffin out of the ground.

Leaning on crutches not far away from the operation was a silhouette Andrew would recognize anywhere. His face was covered in overlapping scars, his auburn curls were shorter and deliberately styled to conceal the way his right eye was not quite the same cerulean blue as the left, but the smile he directed toward Andrew hadn’t changed. 

"Hi."

“You’re back,” Andrew said carefully, refusing to let any inflection show how jarring his absence had been.

"I am." He held his hand out and Andrew closed the distance, fully prepared to feel nothing but the cold November air. Instead, his palm met warm skin, warped by scars and tangible. 

Alive.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Timber Timbre's _Demon Host_ (the KCRW Session version has perfectly spooky vibes for your automnal playlists).  
> You can also find me on [Tumblr](https://matter-of-semantics.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
